It could be argued that the NFL Draft has become the world's most popular sporting event that doesn't contain any actual live sports. The league's annual selection meeting has been around since 1936, but it has increased in popularity in recent years at a rate that outpaces any other major event in the sporting world.

Just ask former Dallas Cowboys vice president of player personnel Gil Brandt, who has been scouting draft prospects for five and a half decades.

"It has exceed expectations by about a million times," Brandt told me over the phone from Texas last week. He remembers the media coverage the draft received in the 1950s and 1960s and can't fathom how much things have changed.

"If we had five or six national writers [covering the draft], that was unheard of. Guys had no idea they were drafted. 'Drafted? Into the Army?' Now, though, the interest in the draft is just totally unbelievable."

Until 1980, the draft wasn't televised. Until 1995, it was held in hotel ballrooms in Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. It moved from Tuesday/Wednesday to Sunday/Monday in 1988, because, according to NFL.com, "the Marriott Marquis [in New York] offered the NFL a better rate on those days for the ballroom space."

Now, 12,000-plus watch live at Radio City Music Hall, with more than 8 million tuning in to watch the first round alone on ESPN and NFL Network, to see which college players are chosen by which pro teams. To put that audience into perspective, two NBA playoff games played on the same night last year garnered a combined 1.8 million viewers.

The Draft routinely crushes the NBA now, as well as the Stanley Cup Finals and postseason baseball. In fact, the lowest-rated game of last year's World Series between the Giants and the Tigers edged out the opening round of the draft by only 2.4 million viewers.

The combined total viewership of the draft grew by nearly 100 percent from 2001 to 2010, according to ESPN's public-relations department. The Super Bowl, for the sake of comparison has only seen its viewership increase by 28 percent since '01 (84 million viewers for Super Bowl XXXV compared to 109 million for this year's game between the Ravens and the 49ers).

The increased interest has spawned a growing field of "draft experts," who seem to appear alongside Punxsutawney Phil each February before disappearing again by the first of May. And it goes beyond the Mel Kipers and Todd McShays of the football world. A cottage industry has emerged, too, built mainly on mock drafts, draft rumors and in-depth scouting reports at websites that are becoming less obscure by the year.

Walter Cherepinsky, who runs WalterFootball.com, says his site gets the vast majority of its readers because of its draft analysis. Cherepinsky writes a popular weekly picks column throughout the year and offers up plenty of fantasy football advice, but none of it holds a candle to the draft. WalterFootball.com received 36 million page views in April of 2012, which was double the viewership it garnered during December, the final month of the actual season.

"The draft stuff just dwarfs everything," Cherepinsky told me last week. "It combines the college football fans and the NFL fans. The college football fans are interested in knowing where their favorite players are gonna go and the NFL fans want to know which players are gonna make their team better."

Cherepinsky notes that the numbers grew each month from September on last year, not because of the approaching playoffs and the Super Bowl, but because there's more draft interest as the season progresses.

"The fans know that they're out of playoff contention," he told me, "so they look forward to the draft to see how their teams can get better."

Why has draft interest increased so much in the last 10-20 years specifically? There are several reasons, but the first—sadly—is that we've been taken advantage of by the league's mad men.

Wait, are we that robotic? Are we victims of a PR machine? Did ESPN and the NFL decide that they needed to push for extra attention in the offseason, causing us to follow like sheep? If ESPN jumped off a bridge, would we join them?

"It is truly an extension of the NFL brand. There are marketing interests that are in play here that go well beyond the NFL. It's not only the NFL creating its next group of marketing faces, but it's also products in any number of industries that these faces are going to be attached to as well."

Both Broder and Raney agreed when asked about a possible connection between the draft and reality television. The draft moved to prime time in 2010, but even before that, the nature of the early-round broadcasts gave it an American Idol feel.

Would you want these people to choose the next NFL star? Photograph: 20thC.Fox/Everett/Rex Features

"It feels that way," said Raney. "Spread out over three days, it's almost like a reality miniseries."

Forget three days. The draft process as a whole is spread out over three months. A ridiculous 7.25 million people tuned into NFL Network to watch the annual scouting combine this past February. During the entire 2012-13 NBA regular season, only two games drew more viewers than that.

And then there are thousands of hours of analysis crammed between the combine and the draft, including John Gruden's increasingly popular QB Camp, which features the former coach working with some of the draft's top prospects.

"I never really thought that it would get this big," Gruden told me on a conference call. "The draft has become a huge spectacle."

"I think the commissioner and the NFL have done an excellent job keeping the game strong and interesting to fans," Gruden added. "This is a big vehicle for teams to get better, obviously, the draft. With the popularity of the game, people want to know who the players are that can help their team turn the corner. I think that's what's made it so exciting and fun. I've enjoyed being a part of it."

Teams certainly do turn that corner often. About five new teams make the playoffs each year, so one player could change everything. And parity is a big reason why draft interest has exploded in recent years.

"I think it's about hope," said Cherepinsky. "Football's the one sport in America where you can turn around in just one year. It's happened so many times. And teams build primarily through the draft."

Indeed they do. Free agency has lost its luster, with Super Bowl champions usually building through the draft. Recent winners such as the Ravens, Giants, Packers and Steelers typically stayed away from free agents, and fans are catching on.

Of course, it's not as though that's a completely new trend. Even before free agency, teams that focused solely on the draft were more successful. Brandt notes that in Super Bowl X in 1976, 85 of the 86 active players were drafted in-house.

"People copy success," said Brandt, who is now a senior analyst at NFL.com. "I think that the teams realize and recognize how important the draft is and consequently are spending a lot more time on it, and I think that the people that are working for these teams are a lot better as far as what you're looking for and what it takes to be an NFL player than people did 25 years ago."

Maybe this is, to some degree, the result of something kick-started by Tex Schramm and those draft-savvy Cowboys teams from the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe it just took time for personnel and scouting departments league-wide to catch up, and for fans to then follow suit, with ESPN playing the catalyst role. The reality is that the fans' interests are going to align with the interests of their favorite teams, but that didn't happen overnight.

It can't be a coincidence that teams and fans became increasingly obsessed with the draft in consecutive eras.

So we're not only brainwashed by what Raney calls "the weight of the league's PR and marketing departments," but we're also influenced by what our teams are focusing on.

There is one thing, though, that everyone involved is invested in, at least to a degree—and that's hope. Any draft pick could be the next Tom Brady or RG3. For teams, that's reason enough to spend millions on scouts. For PR departments, that's reason enough to spend millions on hyping the draft. And for fans, that's reason enough to spend hours reading mock drafts and prospect profiles in the lead-up to the three-day event.

"There's all those mock drafts out there, and they're always wrong," said Raney, "but it's the uncertainty of it."

I spoke to one Cowboys fan last week who said he wasn't even that into the draft, but he still completely understood the intrigue when it comes to that one-in-whatever chance that his team could land the next superstar.

"It's exciting," Kris Barrie told me, "and it endows every fan with a sense of hope that our next superstar is just a walk to the stage away from taking us to the next level."

You can't help but think of the lottery. Statistically, your team's chances of drafting a future Super Bowl MVP are much greater than your chances of winning the Powerball jackpot, but there's a one-in-some high number chance that either will happen. We're drawn to the drama, the mystery, the gamble, and that chance.

Thirty-one of the NFL's 32 teams fail to reach their ultimate goal every year, and those spoiled brats from the 32nd team will always tell you that winning has made them even more hungry. And so everyone is desperate, and nobody can avoid thinking about what the draft might do for them.

Thus, it's no coincidence that the draft has become the second-biggest event on the NFL calendar, behind only the Super Bowl.

Said Broder:

"There's definitely a direct correlation between whatever happens in the draft and their team getting to the Super Bowl. You wonder where it's going to go next."

Guardian US sports will have further NFL Draft coverage this week, including a liveblog of the main event on Thursday, 8pm ET